


Tightrope

by little_specificity



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Arthur-centric, Creatures of Limbo, Gen, Limbo, Loneliness, Post-Inception, inceptgen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27297412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_specificity/pseuds/little_specificity
Summary: Arthur’s city has no clouds, he’s surrounded by pretty lights and his tattoo kills him.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18
Collections: InceptGen





	Tightrope

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this months ago, but after some modifications, I decided to upload it now for the InceptGen Fest and for the Creatures of Limbo challenge (Week 4: Limbo). 
> 
> Also, I got the idea of Arthur having a dragon tattoo from [skin so cold it burns; breathes fire now and then](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11024574) by MargaretKire. This story is not related to that fic at all, but reading it made me add that tattoo to my list of headcanons. I couldn’t stop myself from using the concept at least once. Awesome fic by the way, that one. Beautifully written, absurdly hot; it’s one of my favorites. You should read it if you are into Arthur, Eames and Arthur x Eames. (Talking about fic recs, I have [a blog for that](https://inceptionficrecs.tumblr.com/) if you’re interested)

When Arthur was a child, he was scared of clouds. It wasn’t as if he cried every time he looked up to the sky, but he did feel distraught whenever he observed them and thought about them. Huge figures floating above everything, always present, always gigantic. His mother had told him they didn’t weigh anything, like cotton. Arthur had just smiled at her and didn’t show how mad he got. He knew that it was a lie and that they were actually pretty heavy, he had read about it at school. That little white lie of his mom’s made his fear worse.

Years passed and after having been on planes and discovered more fears of his, he still got somewhat nervous while looking at clouds. They were still enormous and felt like some sort of a threat, like they were going to fall and crush everyone at some point. That’s why in his city there were no clouds, Arthur guessed. It hadn’t been an active choice, they simply weren’t there when he had arrived.

Arthur had never felt at ease while dreaming alone because he knew how easy it was to become obsessed. Having absolute power over a world was addictive, he could recall many names of colleagues who got lost in their heads and never returned. So Arthur avoided it. If he wanted to practice architecture or certain strategies, he would do it with someone else if possible. But he had got to a point in his life where he didn’t feel like doing anything else. He had job offers, but that was it. With Dom back in the States after betraying him and with no other meaningful relationships, he felt lonely. There was finally silence around him, but it brought noise inside his head. He had thought about a vacation, about trying to find someone, but the lack of the need to watch his back constantly made him pay attention to himself in a different way. And he had reached the terrible realization that there was something wrong with him. Very wrong.

That’s what he told himself as an excuse to go under, planning to take a long time in there. He had many unsolved issues, many things to think about. What would be a better way to understand the roots of his problems than visiting his own mind? He knew it was risky, but the thrill of adrenaline he felt as he started to hook himself into the PASIV made the decision for him. It wasn’t as if he was going to forget he was dreaming, not really, he had a purpose in mind.

“I like it better here,” Mal whispered with a smile Arthur knew was there without having to actually look.

“Where’s here?” Arthur asked, not bothering to tear his gaze from the stars above them.

“Here with _you _,” Mal answered emphasizing the you, with a ghost of a giggle.__

__The first time he saw Mal in his dreamed city, Arthur had felt guilty and sick. He had reminded himself that it was just a projection, only a fake shadow of the woman who had meant so much to him. A memory both Dom and Arthur had profaned over and over in their dreams, unintentionally. The real Mal had been lovely but flawed, beautiful and smart but sometimes bossy and demanding. Real. The woman by his side was like a photograph. But she was there for a reason and what Arthur was looking for were reasons. She was the embodiment of some deep meaning he needed to figure out, he supposed._ _

__At that particular moment, they were on the rooftop of a skyscraper, looking into the night sky. Pitch darkness only interrupted by some little stars and a big, big moon. He didn’t mind the moon._ _

__“And not there with him,” Mal added after some time. The pang of guilt in Arthur’s stomach made him close his eyes for a second, just like all the times before that one._ _

__“I know that,” Arthur answered. “You say it a lot.”_ _

__“Really?”_ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__“Oh.”_ _

__The thing with his big, eternally nightly city was that it had become repetitive and increasingly confusing. The only things he did with the fake Mal was having walks and staring at the sky on rooftops. Their conversations told Arthur a lot about himself, but nothing new. He already knew that he had been a little in love with her many years before. He knew that he regretted never telling her, if only just to say it. He already knew he resented Dom, even if he didn’t want to and tried his best not to. To keep on talking to fake Mal was pointless. She wasn’t giving him any answers, but he couldn’t help but return and watch the sky with her._ _

__What if there was more meaning in the words uttered by her, over and over again? What if Arthur’s brain was trying to tell him something else? Maybe Arthur just needed to hear someone say that he was the only person they wanted to spend their time with, even if they weren’t real. Even if they were technically himself. And the more Arthur thought about it, the more convinced he became that maybe fake Mal could enlighten him only a little. There were so many possible meanings._ _

__“See you later,” he said as he stood up to leave, leaving her on the rooftop smiling at the sky. He didn’t look back as he took the stairs that took him from the rooftop directly to the streets. There were a lot of steps and Arthur kept promising himself that he would build something else, but it was a pretty aesthetic._ _

__The other thing with his big city in the bottom of his mind was that something was wrong, had been for some time. Projections were slightly off and he suspected buildings were slowly changing. He wasn’t completely sure about the buildings because he didn’t pay a lot of attention to all the details like he used to. But he knew something was going on and, deep down, that he needed to wake up soon. He just wasn’t ready yet. There were so many things he needed to figure out, so many projections he wanted to have a conversation with. He still hadn’t solved the majority of his internal conflicts, and it would be just sad to go back without nothing to tell to his reflection in the mirror._ _

__He felt a twinge in his arm and started walking faster, as if doing so would make the pain and what he supposed it meant, go away. He knew exactly what was causing the discomfort, it was the dragon. That big, inked, dark dragon that had lived in his arm for years now. When he had been younger and felt invincible, he thought it would not only look amazing but also would serve as a reminder of something he forgot as years passed by. Arthur started to feel it moving just when he started noticing unusual things in his dreamscape. He hadn’t taken off his shirt to see it, too afraid to do so. Taking a look at the creature that moved whenever he considered waking up didn’t feel like the right thing to do._ _

__He walked to the main square of the city, eyeing the projections that passed him by his sides. All the faces that he saw were only lightened by the immense, colorful and bright billboards around them that rested in the impossibly tall skyscrapers’ walls. A show of colored features and interesting angles plagued his surroundings. He had never seen such a dark night and billboards so bright. It was beautiful, breath-taking, and fear-inducing for anyone who wasn’t Arthur. The dragon stopped squeezing and Arthur felt like he could breathe again, forgetting all about another world._ _

__Things were almost okay then. Maybe some projections had started to get very repetitive and shallow, like Mal’s and his mother’s. Maybe some buildings were changing its appearances without Arthur’s command. But the city was still so amazing, the projections too. How could he leave? How could he wake up when every corner seemed to hide the secret of Arthur’s happiness? A complete understanding of the self?_ _

__He felt calm and ready to go visit Dom’s projection who was usually fishing in a small lake in the middle of the city when he saw Eames standing in the distance, looking directly at him and ignoring all the passersby. Suddenly, the dragon squeezed harder than ever before and Arthur gasped. His chest felt tight. If sweat existed in his dreamed world, he was sure a cold one would start running on his skin. A projection of Eames was something new. He started walking towards it._ _

__However, he started to recognize the tightness in his chest as a crushing hope, a feeling he discovered hadn’t felt in almost a decade in real-world time. He walked very slowly towards Eames, the black dragon moving more than ever, crawling on his arm. But Arthur didn’t care, he even extended his arm so they both could be more comfortable, walking more rapidly. If Eames was there, he thought, it wasn’t a projection. Maybe, only maybe, someone had noticed Arthur hadn’t spoken to anyone in far too much time and had sent…_ _

__But no. Oh, no. It wasn’t Eames at all. Arthur’s brow furrowed. The projection kept looking at him intensely, using Eames’ appearance. But he was like a picture, like Mal. Like a very bad forge, like a realist painting. It looked like Eames, but it was completely blank. His gaze, his features, his posture oddly tense. It was the worst projection of someone Arthur had ever seen. He was crestfallen. No one had come to wake him up, to figure out what had happened to Arthur. The only thing he had was his imaginary city, which was getting progressively darker, and his projections that were transforming into simple tridimensional pictures._ _

__“What even are you?”_ _

__“It’s me, I came to get you out.”_ _

__The dragon squeezed and squeezed and Arthur just kept holding his arm in front of him, without any real purpose now._ _

__“That’s not true, you aren’t Eames.”_ _

__“I am,” the projection insisted, smirking._ _

__Arthur had to look away. It was one of the eeriest things that he had seen in a while, how a simple smile looked so out of place, so foreign in a familiar face. It was not how Eames smiled, at all. Arthur didn’t even think that Eames was able to smile in that particular way._ _

__“You have been here for too long,” the projection said, in a terrible British accent._ _

__Arthur’s dragon kept moving until it reached his chest. Arthur felt like he was burning. He looked around and everything seemed so, so different. The beautiful darkness of everything that wasn’t illuminated by the colorful and bright artificial lights seemed threatening. The line between beauty and danger was blurred. It happened so suddenly, Arthur kept thinking. There was no possible way everything had looked so distorted and he hadn’t noticed before, right?_ _

__“How long?” Arthur asked._ _

__The projection took a step in Arthur’s direction. The look on his face was still unrecognizable. Arthur walked backwards until he felt a cold stone wall in his back. It shouldn’t be there. Where was his control?_ _

__Arthur’s knees buckled and he fell to the ground, feeling a cold and silky body slithering on his own. It was too late. He couldn’t distract himself anymore. The dragon stopped squeezing and instead felt heavier than ever in every point it touched Arthur’s skin. He could barely breathe, the creature’s tail was rounding his neck. The wall was hard and cool in his back, projections walked around him like busy citizens of a city where it was always night and there were no clouds, in which everyone had colorful lights in their faces and buildings moved. That was it was supposed to be, but everything felt so wrong._ _

__He wondered, desperately and with tears in his face, if the dragon had been a protector from his own mind or merely a signal that something bad was going to happen. Was it trying to kill him so he could wake up and save the little sanity he had left? Was it trying to finally get him out so he could face a danger that had been waiting patiently in the real word?_ _

__The last things Arthur saw after waking up were the eyes of the beast. They were big and darker than the sky, darker than everything Arthur had ever seen. They were like voids who had swallowed him whole. The creature had eaten him without opening its mouth._ _

__The first thing Arthur thought when he regained conscience, was that something smelled awful. The second one, was that his back was aching. The third one, that he didn’t remember where he was._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Do I fully understand what limbo is and how it works? No
> 
> The title of this fic is also the title of a song by LP that I like and came into my mind when I thought about this story.
> 
> [ Come say hi on my Tumblr!](https://little-specificity.tumblr.com)


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